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Dr. Eric D. Isaacs begins his tenure asthe 11th president of the Carnegie Institution on July 2, 2018. Isaacs joins Carnegie from theUniversity of Chicagowhere he has been the Robert A. Millikan Distinguished Service Professor, Department of Physics and the James Franck Institute Executive Vice President for Research, Innovation and National Laboratories.

The hit Syfy series closed out its inaugural season with some intense action, serious emotional moments, and a jaw-dropping ending. Tonight's season finale was so wild that we aren't quite sure how we're going to wait for next season to see how things play out. In the meantime we have some major questions about what happened during tonight's "The Phantom Zone," what it means for some of our favorite characters, and how the whole thing impacts Superman mythos as we thought we knew it.

Going into tonight's episode we know Brainiac had arrived on
Krypton
, Zod is Seg's son, Adam Strange lives, and no one knows where Doomsday is. Coming out we want to know so much more so here are our big questions following tonight's season one finale of Krypton.

Oh, and if for some reason you're reading this and haven't yet seen the finale episode, there are spoilers beyond this point. Big ones.

Last week, Zod wanted to use Doomsday to take down Brainiac while Seg did not. Both men were thwarted though when the Cythonnites decided to take Doomsday away for their own purposes -- which involved putting him somewhere so that when his containment unit fails? He'll get to break free and attack anything in his path. In theory that will include Brainiac, but it will also include regular Kryptonians as well. This is, as you might guess, a bad situation.

Yet in tonight's finale Doomsday didn't arrive and, to make matters worse, we found out that even the dreaded Doomsday can't take down Brainiac. The Brainiac concern was made moot due to him being sent in the Phantom Zone (more on that in a bit) so with that threat out of the way -- what happened to Doomsday? We're betting that he's out there somewhere in Kandor, his containment unit's failure imminent, waiting for the perfect moment in season two to appear.

Tonight's episode held a stunning reveal for Nyssa. With Brainiac in the process of bottling the city, the plan was to flee and that's exactly what Nyssa aimed to do. She just had one important stop first. She went to collect the fetus of her future child with Seg and in the process runs into Jax-Ur who reveals a shocking truth.

As we discovered last episode, there was a secret cloning program used by members of the elite to remain immortal. Tonight, viewers and Nyssa found out that she isn't the first Nyssa-Vex. Instead, when she was a child, she was gravely injured in the same accident that killed her mother. Her body was beyond repair, but she had enough neural function that they were able to use her clone and fuse the original Nyssa with the clone. Her whole life? It's been a lie.

So how does Nyssa move forward from that? Discovering your dad is pretty much a terrible person as Nyssa has is one thing. Discovering that he orchestrated this lie of your life? Very different. Nyssa's entire sense of identity is now up in the air, but at least it looks like she has someone to lean on. We see her and Jax-Ur arrive at the Fortress in the final moments of tonight's episode where Val-El is waiting.

Brainiac was defeated tonight, but at a cost. Before fully being sent to the Phantom Zone, Brainiac managed to drag Seg with him and the instant they both disappeared Superman's cape was no longer Superman's cape. Gone was the House of El. In its place? The crest of House Zod. You see, with Seg gone, Superman will never be born and there's no one to stop Zod from taking control of Kandor and Krypton and that's exactly what we see happen. A few weeks after Brainiac's defeat and Zod has full authoritarian control. People have even been made to kneel.

So. What about Superman? Well, fans, right now it looks like there is no Superman and that doesn't bode well for Earth.

Remember when we saw Adam Strange interacting with some odd woman last week? Turns out, that was on Earth and as we find out tonight she wasn't moving because Brainiac had bottled where she was, locking her and everyone else into place. Does that mean Brainiac has taken Earth?

No, Brainiac has not taken Earth. He has, however, apparently bottled Detroit which is where Adam was sent back to. And if that wasn't a terrifying enough realization for our space and time traveller the next thing he sees certainly is. There's a big statue of Zod in Detroit, presumably where one to Superman may have stood.

Say it with me: this is not good.

As it appears that Adam was sent back to a bottled Detroit it kind of puts him in a position where he isn't able to help sort things out on Krypton or deal with the lack of Superman situation. So waht now?

Realistically anything is possible. As we "met" Sardath and Alanna this season they might have the ability to intervene. It's also possible that the changes to the timeline now that Zod is in power on Krypton may result in other characters showing up. We know, thanks to Geoff John's comments at San Diego Comic-Con last year that
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Maybe one of those characters will play a role in bringing Adam back into the action.

The Phantom Zone plays a key role in tonight's episode. First, we discover that Val-El did not die but instead went into the Phantom Zone during his "execution" during the season premiere. Why hadn't he come back? Well, Zod stole the device he needed to get home for his own selfish aims. When Zod realized they needed Val, though, he went to get him and that's when they discovered the horrible truth: there is no way to defeat Brainiac.

Except, Seg figured out a way. When Zod decided he would simply trade Val to Brainiac for total control of Krypton, Zod brought the alien to the Fortress. Seg said that he would rather shoot his grandfather than let Brainiac have him and Brainiac, thinking himself pretty smart said that Seg was lying and, oh, by the way, he knows a hologram when he sees one. But despite being a twelfth level intellect he doesn't seem to be able to see a trap. Brainiac stepped right into the center of the room and Seg sent him to the Phantom Zone. Unfortunately, Brainiac took Seg with him.

What's next? As we've seen, Seg isn't going down without a fight. We expect that he will either find a way out of the Phantom Zone or make an alliance that will restore him to Krypton to fight Zod.

Now that Seg is trapped in the Phantom Zone it's likely that we'll get a peek inside next season. But who will we see? As we've seen with Zod and Val being in the Zone at the same time time doesn't really work the same way there that it does outside of it so we could, theoretically see villains and others from almost any point in the timeline -- and the mythos. That's a large swath of characters, but there's one possibility that we think could be very intriguing: Cor-Vex.

Tonight, we saw Nyssa desperately trying to save her unborn child, Cor-Vex. In , the character Car-Vex served under General Zod and was eventually placed in the Phantom Zone. As the series
did, at one time, have a bit of connective tissue to l
, it's not impossible that Seg could encounter a variant version of his future child in the Phantom Zone. Considering that Zod is also his son, that itself could be very interesting.

When Zod confronts Braniac, he mentions that the next planet Brainiac has his sights set on is Cygnus 4019. In comics, Cygnus 4019 is better known as Planet Salvation, a distant planet full of deadly tech, creatures, and one that is used by the New Gods of Apokolips as a training planet of sorts.

That's right, we said New Gods.

If Brainiac is after Planet Salvation, does this mean we might end up seeing the New Gods on ? It's not impossible, though with the New Gods movie in the works how that would play out in terms of character usage is anyone's guess. One thing that we do know is that bringing Cygnus 4019 into the equation opens up a ton of possibilities -- not only is it the New Gods' training planet of sorts, but in comics Amanda Waller and Checkmate have both used it as a prison for metahuman villains.

airs on Wednesday nights at 10 p.m. ET/PT on SYFY. New episodes return in 2019.

But there are tradeoffs to this approach. The application logic is more complex, you are paying for the queue, and there may be data consistency issues to consider.

SLA for multi-region deployments
. Another HA technique is to deploy the application in more than one region, and use Azure Traffic Manager to fail over if the application fails in one region. For a two-region deployment, the composite SLA is calculated as follows.

SLA for multi-region deployments

Let
N
be the composite SLA for the application deployed in one region. The expected chance that the application will fail in both regions at the same time is (1 − N) × (1 − N). Therefore,

Finally, you must factor in the
SLA for Traffic Manager
. At the time of this writing, the SLA for Traffic Manager SLA is 99.99%.

The calculated SLA number is a useful baseline, but it doesn't tell the whole story about availability. Often, an application can degrade gracefully when a non-critical path fails. Consider an application that shows a catalog of books. If the application can't retrieve the thumbnail image for the cover, it might show a placeholder image. In that case, failing to get the image does not reduce the application's uptime, although it affects the user experience.

Failures can vary in the scope of their impact. Some hardware failures, such as a failed disk, may affect a single host machine. A failed network switch could affect a whole server rack. Less common are failures that disrupt a whole data center, such as loss of power in a data center. Rarely, an entire region could become unavailable.

One of the main ways to make an application resilient is through redundancy. But you need to plan for this redundancy when you design the application. Also, the level of redundancy that you need depends on your business requirements — not every application needs redundancy across regions to guard against a regional outage. In general, there is a tradeoff between greater redundancy and reliability versus higher cost and complexity.

Azure has a number of features to make an application redundant at every level of failure, from an individual VM to an entire region.

Single VM
. Azure provides an uptime SLA for single VMs. Although you can get a higher SLA by running two or more VMs, a single VM may be reliable enough for some workloads. For production workloads, we recommend using two or more VMs for redundancy.

Single VM

Availability sets
. To protect against localized hardware failures, such as a disk or network switch failing, deploy two or more VMs in an availability set. An availability set consists of two or more
fault domains
that share a common power source and network switch. VMs in an availability set are distributed across the fault domains, so if a hardware failure affects one fault domain, network traffic can still be routed the VMs in the other fault domains. For more information about Availability Sets, see
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.

Efforts to strengthen resilience against disasters and climate change have gained momentum in recent years. But, how can we ensure these efforts are benefiting people who need the most?

Take the case of an ADB-supported technical assistance project in communities from 10 villages in Gunungkidul District in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The communities got together with their local governments to lead a village risk-mapping process to identify and prioritize resilience-building measures.

From an outsider perspective, resilience building should have a stronger focus on earthquake risk, especially since the communities have witnessed large-scale destruction of housing and infrastructure in the recent past. But for local residents, the priority is drought – a hazard that is more frequent and has a direct impact on their livelihoods. They recognize the shifting patterns of rain and dry periods in recent years, resulting in frequent crop failures that directly impact their livelihoods.

Worsening water shortages are also an issue, requiring households to buy water for domestic purposes, farming and for tending livestock. This has sharply increased household expenses.

Through the risk-mapping process, villagers prioritized resilience-building strategies that would reduce food and water shortages and protect natural resources while increasing income.

An example is planting acacia on hill slopes. Since the acacia tree is drought-tolerant and helps to stabilize the soil in areas threatened by erosion, the space between the trees is being used to plant ginger and herbs that command a good price in the local market.

Data on vulnerable individuals (women, children, the elderly and disabled), collected by women’s groups are being used to improve the targeting of social protection programs.

In the past, women’s groups were only involved in decision-making on social issues such as health and education. However, the risk mapping process has allowed them to better understand infrastructure and livelihoods-related needs for strengthening resilience. They are able to bring these needs to the local authorities, and thus engage in wider development issues.

Furthermore, the collective understanding of risk allowed the communities to advocate for resilience-building measures to be financed through the village development fund.

This case study highlights a few considerations that are critical for resilience initiatives to have an impact.

First, natural hazards are becoming more frequent and intense with climate change. When communities prioritize resilience-building measures, they usually focus on hazards that have everyday impacts on their lives and livelihoods.

However, natural hazards are only one factor contributing to disaster risk. The other two underlying factors are exposure of people and assets to the natural hazards, and the degree of vulnerability faced by those people and assets.

Both exposure and vulnerability are often shaped at the local level (because of decision-making processes involved in local development). Efforts to enhance resilience therefore require knowledge of the local area such as physical geography, socioeconomic issues, the role of women in the community, and how decisions are made.

Without such local knowledge, efforts to improve resilience will not be sustainable and will not benefit those who need them most.

Second, resilience interventions often look solely at how to avoid potential losses due to damage to infrastructure and assets from disasters.

The assumption here is that everyone in the community has equal access to infrastructure and assets and that they will therefore benefit from resilient infrastructure. That, however, that may not be the case.

More importantly, damage to assets provides a partial picture of the impacts on poor households or communities. It is equally important to understand the impact of disasters on income and wellbeing. This will help us design interventions that achieve development benefits over the short term (through livelihoods), as well as reduce vulnerability in the long term.

The interventions will also be more holistic in nature as they would support different facets of resilience – physical, livelihoods, social, ecosystems, financial, and institutional.

Third, when designing projects to improve the resilience of poor and vulnerable communities, we should not forget that populations living in these communities are not homogenous.

The impacts of disasters may have different effects on different groups and may need different solutions to strengthen resilience.

For example, chronically poor or vulnerable individuals may need more consumption support during lean times to deal the impact of disasters. On the other hand, households that are “transitional” poor may need support during specific times of the year, such as flood season, to diversify their livelihood and acquire new skills so they can adapt to changing hazard patterns. Women have specific needs and may need tailored solutions to strengthen resilience.

Moreover, household level interventions may be called for, whereas in other cases community-level interventions might be more appropriate.

Governments and development partners in Asia-Pacific are systematically assessing disaster risk in the context of project preparation across different sectors.

However, these assessments tend to focus on identifying the potential risks of disasters to the proposed project outputs (roads, water supply, irrigation, school building) and not necessarily the risk faced by the communities in the local areas.

This leads to resilience measures that do not always address the underlying factors contributing to exposure and vulnerability, and do not benefit all those who need more support to deal with climate change and disaster risk.

Moving forward, part of the solution would be to support local risk mapping, at least during preparation of projects that target interventions at household, community, and local government level. Examples include community-driven rural development, upgrading of urban informal settlements, and social protection.

Assessments undertaken through participatory processes will help capture local perspectives on disaster risk and identify underlying factors that contribute to localized risk that can be supported through the project.

Moreover, the benefits of local level assessment go beyond informing project design. They provide opportunities for transformational changes. For example, communities can be empowered to interact with local governments to collectively identify disaster risk, including how that risk is changing over time. They can build consensus on priority interventions for strengthening resilience, and, in many cases take actions by mobilizing local resources.

Resilience-building projects should have mechanisms to ensure that the funds are actually reaching the local level, and that communities have a say on how to spend the money. Deciding for the communities without consulting them, and then expecting the locals to support the arrangement is not sustainable for resilience building.

And that’s not all. Once the communities have had their say, they must have the capacity and skills to implement the resilience initiatives they have prioritized in the risk-mapping process.